Chesapeake Bay sailing school teaches success to learning disabled students

From The Baltimore Sun. In the picture, Ben Catterton (left) and Riggs Brusnighan will be instructing younger campers this summer at the Brendan Sail Training Program.

The sun was bright and hot, but the waters of the Chesapeake Bay were icy as the Brendan Sail instructors launched a small sailboat at Annapolis Sailing School in Edgewater, Md.

"Yeee-oww," Riggs Brusnighan, 15, howled as he waded into the shockingly cold water to scrape off the winter's rust. Classes start soon in America's sailing capital, and there is no time to waste.

They say every child who grows up in Annapolis should learn to sail, and there are probably enough sailing schools here to accommodate them all. But the Brendan Sail Training Program is different.

It is a sailing school for teens with learning disabilities ranging from dyslexia to autism. And it isn't just the students who battle these challenges. It's the instructors, too.

The school doesn't teach sailing as much as it teaches success. At graduation, when the students take their parents out for a celebratory sail, those same parents, who hesitantly turned over their children to the Brendan instructors just two weeks earlier, often return with tear-streaked faces.

"We often hear the same thing," said Jim Muldoon, who founded the school 26 years ago. " 'My son was showing off! He's never had anything to show off before!' "

Muldoon, a Washington businessman and avid sailor, named Brendan Sail for the monk the Irish believe discovered America long before Columbus.

His own son was significantly learning-disabled, but Muldoon realized that sailing might work for the boy who could not tell right from left, but who instinctively understood everything else about the strange plane geometry of sailing.

"One day, we were on our way to the starting line for a race," recalls Muldoon, "and all these big guys crewing for me were taking instructions from Jimmy, who was maybe 9. I realized he didn't have the kind of confidence on land that he had at sea."

"Sailing is something you do not learn by reading a book but by feel, sight and touch. I don't know why it works for these kids but, boy, does it work."

Five hundred students, most of them boys, have passed through the program, which has a 6-to-1 student-teacher ratio. Almost all of the teaching is done on the water, not in the classroom, which so many of these kids, ages 11 to 18, have come to associate with failure and frustration.

This year, five of the instructors are former students, ages 15 to 18. One, Bradley Macpherson, has gone on to complete U.S. Sailing's instructor certification. (Because of his learning issues, Macpherson completed the exams orally.) Two more, Ben Catterton and Henry Cloutier, are working to complete their certification this summer.

Macpherson likes the challenge of figuring out the right path into the brains of the highly individualized students he teaches. "I had one student with Asperger's syndrome," he recalled. "He was awesome. I didn't think he was even listening to me, but in one day, he had memorized everything."

The program is overseen by volunteers Pat Ewing, an insurance broker who is himself dyslexic, and Guy Weigand, Ewing's friend and sailing buddy of many years.

The camp, which begins June 29, costs $250 for one 8-day session, $450 for both 8-day sessions.

"Ben was furious with me when I signed him up," said Chris Catterton, Ben Catterton's mother. "He thought it was another one of my dumb ideas. That was five years ago. He has missed only one day since."

Ben, Bradley, Henry and Riggs were part of the crew that sailed Muldoon's yacht to St. Maarten over Thanksgiving weekend for wintering. They left Annapolis in gale-force winds and many of them were seasick for days. But they talk about it now with enormous pride.

"I wasn't sure Brad would really leave for college when it came down to it," said Linda Macpherson, whose son will study at Salisbury University in the fall and probably join the sailing team.

"But after that sail, he knew he could do it. I knew he could do it."